Unfinished
by phantasmagorienne
Summary: She is incongruous and brightly coloured and very, very real, but these are merely surface things, and his words to him seem awkward and fragmentary. RemusTonks.


**_Author's Note:_**_ I was purposefully vague in stating where exactly Remus is living at the moment, since I'm really not sure what he does after the events of Half-Blood Prince. This was written an hour after "The Saddest Lines" so I suppose that one could call it a sort of sequel, or reprise at least. Remus and Tonks were mucking about in my mind a lot that particular day, it seems._

* * *

**Unfinished**

He is scrawling, scrawling, words rushing out quicker now after the fact—after so many facts—and in his new and tangled grief and hope he does not know what to make of things. So he makes time in words, taking curious solace in the long, careful lines he makes across the page, because any semblance of order, in this sudden mess of a world, is a comfort.

He tries to put her into words, part out of retribution, and part in hope. He did not think, for several world-shattering minutes in the Hogwarts infirmary, that it was _right_ or _fitting_ for there to be hope, and it took longer still for him to believe that joy was now anything but obscene. But she bashed sense into him—or rather out of him, because sense is not always right after all—and now he fumbles clumsily between his emotions: the deep dull grief of loss, the thrill and wonder of finding. He thinks that perhaps now, in the stillness of night, his quill can find the words that his tongue cannot, but the blots and crossings-out on the parchment are testament to his remaining confusion.

So he attempts to describe _her_—she is incongruous and brightly coloured and very, very real, but these are merely surface things, and his words to him seem awkward and fragmentary, unfinished. He cannot capture _life_ with his quill, vivacity and tenderness and steadfast loyalty and _love_. Because this _is_ love—not mere blazing passion, or attraction—it is friendship, but deeper; it is, he finally scrawls, trying to make poetry and succeeding only in stark prose, a co-naturality of being, separate pieces fitting together where required and needed to form a cogent whole.

She finds his papers, when she is bustling about tidying his things and bossing him cheerfully, because they both know that it is _good_ for him. She has burnt her fingers on her tea, and dumped too much sugar in his, but he loves her for this. She is stuffing his mess of papers together before he quite realises what she is doing, and she stops over one page and _looks_ at him, fingertips tracing ink-lines.

"They are just scrawlings," he explains, embarrassed and somehow delighted. "Clumsy ones at that, and thoroughly unfinished—I didn't exactly mean for you to find them—just yet."

She smiles at him: tenderly warmly, brilliantly. "_I_ am clumsy," she says, "not a sonnet-heavy woman of yesteryear, you know. I prefer these words, fragmentary but _honest_, Remus, to waxing ecstatic over my midnight hair and starlit eyes." And she grins, lopsidedly, from the mess of his papers.

"Not midnight—sunrise. Pink like the sunrise. I'm sure that would do well in a sonnet." He laughs. It feels good to laugh; it feels less _heavy_. "But it is still unfinished," he says, and reaches for her hand, or the papers, or both.

"Remus," she says, a little sternly and very tenderly, "_we_ are unfinished. We will always be unfinished, though we'll always keep at the finishing until death ends things for us." She takes the papers, sets them on the desk behind her. One falls from the stack and drifts to the floor. "Being unfinished leaves much room for improvement," she says brightly, and there is wisdom in her eyes that is so incongruous with her youth. But Nymphadora Tonks _is_ incongruity. This is, among many things, why he loves her.

"Improvement." He takes both her hands. "I am not wholly adverse to that." After a moment, he grows serious again. "Is there room for amending?" he asks softly, for he remembers (too well) brown hair and loneliness and _hurt_.

"There is room for forgiveness," she says, and there are inkstains on her fingers from his unfinished words; when she touches his face the inky remnants mark his cheek.

* * *

_Those who review get one of my mother's magic pies; she tells me that she got my father to kiss her after she made this pie for him when they were dating. :)_


End file.
